This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature

Introduction

Introduction This Is All I Choose to Tell offers an analytical introduction to Vietnamese American literature, and delineates the historical, social, and cultural terrains from which the writings emerge and critics read and interpret them. It addresses the debates, themes, and issues that surround the production of that literature, foregrounding the concept of hybridity, and closely examining a few texts that students are likely to read in university settings. This Is All I Choose to Tell views many Vietnamese American literary texts as discrete steps in the process of articulating new identities that cannot be fixed in time. As it generalizes strategically about Vietnamese American identity and experiences, this work simultaneously examines these identities in terms of subjectivities that are always in flux and vary greatly, depending, for instance , on the individual’s time of arrival, class, race, gender, sexuality, and exposure to trauma. Although Vietnamese Americans established a presence in America more than thirty-five years ago, this is the first booklength study of their literature. It considers such questions as who Vietnamese Americans are and what are the main themes and markers of the literature they have created. What can we learn from Vietnamese American texts? And what is the place 2 / introduction of this literature in Asian American studies, and why? From a more theoretical standpoint, I ask how one can study the external forces that shape Vietnamese American identity and articulate this identity while acknowledging the impossibility of fully encapsulating it, and while recognizing the imperfect nature of generalizations. Also, can the term “Vietnamese American,” so freighted with memories of the Viet Nam War and national guilt, be disassociated from the systems of representation and history of that event without eradicating its legacy? And finally, can a Vietnamese American narrator’s memory of the past be analyzed without replicating a problematic law of origin as arbiter of both content and form? As it addresses these questions, This Is All I Choose to Tell engages with the material, political, and historical production of differences that stands in stark contrast to a multiculturalism that asserts representationality for all. Rather than regarding the texts as narratives of progress and assimilation, it detects forces of exclusion and directives that work both for and against Vietnamese American literary production.1 Race is understood here as politically, socially, historically, and culturally constructed. Vietnamese Americans writers, because of their connection to the Viet Nam War and because they are people of color, encounter stronger pressure of representation than other Asian American immigrants. The book is divided in two parts. The first, which includes three chapters, speaks toward the “inclusion” of Vietnamese American literary studies in academia and of Vietnamese American literature in American culture. Because students know so little about the Vietnamese American history that is often woven into the narratives themselves, the first chapter provides an introduction to social and historical contexts of postcolonial, refugee, immigrant, minority, and transnational Vietnamese American experiences; it also looks at what it means to be largely absent from the narrative of the nation. To further situate the texts selected for discussion, chapter 2 surveys Vietnamese American literature from the 1960s to 2010, pointing to themes introduction / 3 like home politics, nostalgia, history, return, and identity. The chapter considers how and why novels, autobiographies, memoirs , collaborative projects, translations, and anthologies have changed over this half century. In chapter 3, I locate Vietnamese American literature within the field from which this book is produced, namely, Asian American studies. It asks why no book on Vietnamese American literature has been published until now in that field, and it identifies key frameworks within which one might read that literature, stressing the importance of those that account for hybridity. This chapter challenges the ubiquitous images of the Viet Nam War that tend to color the perception of Vietnamese Americans and addresses concerns about the depoliticization and dehistorization of Asian American literary criticism. After setting the larger context in which Vietnamese American literature is produced, Part Two, “Interpretation,” deepens the analysis. Chapter 4 explores strategies of survival in Andrew Pham’s creative nonfiction memoir Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam2 and Lan Cao’s novel Monkey Bridge3 while taking in consideration issues of race, class, gender and trauma. It looks at the narrators’ memories and emotional responses to resettlement , and finds them central to the identities articulated in the texts, sometimes also...